Specs gives you a high-level window into your ECS clusters and services.

It provides a handy search box to find particular services in production, and then helps diagnose what the service’s exact state. Specs lets us know if a container isn’t able to be placed due to insufficient capacity or if all containers in a service are dead.

It gives the entire development team a better picture of how our production environment is configured.

We run Specs behind an internal Google oAuth server, so any engineer can view it even if they don’t have an IAM account. It’s allowed a lot more of the team to debug issues without bothering the core infra team.

Getting started with Specs couldn’t be easier. Assuming you’re running Docker and have your AWS credentials exported, just run the following command: